Hrm, but do all rewards have to be in direct game power ups/wealth? Consider that combat might have other rewards like better access to resources and protection of weaker sorts. Meaning combatants might be very useful to no fighters after all. Look at it this way, you might not get a bajillion gold for your orc hunting, but appreciative merchants and craftsmen would probably reward you well for keeping trade lines clear or mining operations safe. And, of course, dragons like to stockpile wealth so it's not like there aren't *any* treasure hordes out there ;-)
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Hrm, but do all rewards have to be in direct game power ups/wealth? Not neccessarily :P. The other two flavors of rewards are something to give bragging rights and access to further regions of the game. Consider that combat might have other rewards like better access to resources and protection of weaker sorts. Meaning combatants might be very useful to no fighters after all. Look at it this way, you might not get a bajillion gold for your orc hunting, but appreciative merchants and craftsmen would probably reward you well for keeping trade lines clear or mining operations safe. If you're game engine can handle this it's great however with dynamic systems that can be largely affected by players you can run into nasty problems when players don't behave like you want and end up collapsing your system :P. Not to mention all the issues you have to tackle to even get a dynamic system especially one that can handle a multiplayer environment decently. | |
and I think your missing everyone elses point. You can make a game where it is discouraged to battle, but still required for some aspects of a game. I like a good game where battle is allowed, but not the only path to take.
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Jamesburrow wrote:
and I think your missing everyone elses point. You can make a game where it is discouraged to battle, but still required for some aspects of a game. I like a good game where battle is allowed, but not the only path to take. Like Fable? That game rocked. :) | |
good point there. I have to let you know, I agree on the part where blowing stuff up should not be the dominant aproach at winning. (Even though the commercial for the Mercenaries game is nothing but blowing stuff up, and that looks like a cool game.) I like blowing stuff up, but I dislike having to blow stuff up every few minutes in order to beat the game.
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lol. I'm in the debate team at school, so I'm used to complex arguments. but it is starting to confuse even me.
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Elation wrote:
...trying to convince them to shut down dream seeker via button combinations. you can say that again. after seeing it happen to the first guy, I not only memeorized the buttons that would do that, but I also check the menus before I hit them to see what it would do. Of course, I though that was a ban in chatters if your caught? | |
Jamesburrow wrote:
Elation wrote: If you get caught. ;) Anyway, just letting you know: there's such thing as an edit button. It's much better to compile lots of replies into one post than 5. | |
Theodis wrote:
I understand that that's how Theodis sees it in his missionary zeal, Yeah, but I'm not the one who butted into a topic which was at best tangentially related just so that I could spout off about my pet causes. At least I wasn't the one who did it first this time, which means I can score points off of you. :P From JMurph's post on perma death Your understandification are imcorrect! I mean, seriously. He never said "Combat is reasonably balanced already but I don't want players to engage in combat, so I'll slash its profitability!" He said "In my opinion combat is almost always unbalanced and far too rewarding, so I will bring its profitability down to levels where pursuing dedicated non-combat roles can viably compete with combat roles." Look at what he actually says for his proposed solution: 1. Combat is less forced on players. True, not many RPGs actually force players into combat, but most of them do require players to fight and win in battle in order to get anywhere. If you don't fight and fight frequently, you can't participate in the game--often, you can't even participate effectively in the non-combat segments (chat is of course an exception, but it's generally not a unique feature which defines a game's playing experience--especially in the sort of games we're talking about). 2. Combat should revolve around meaningful choices. This holds true even in pure combat games--it is, in effect, an alternate wording for the suggestion you made for non-combat features. 3. Combat would usually not be fought to the death. This is a feature to limit the risk of combat; at worst, it's a mitigating factor, and depending on the specifics of implementation it could possibly make combat less painful compared to many non-permadeath solutions. 4. Monsters would not always carry inherent profit. See #2! One of the big things that bugs me about leveling treadmill games is the "Pull lever, get reward" aspect; the only difference is that pulling the lever consists of typing "attack orc". Instead of earning loot being a matter of "Who can best adapt to new circumstances to come up with the most effective plan possible to topple this orc stronghold?", it's "Who can farm the most orcs with the greatest efficiency?" Sure, just randomly removing treasure from half the mobs in the world isn't going to accomplish much, but setting up the game so that players have to put some planning and thought into getting loot instead of simply attacking mobs because they're there only serves to make the fighting-for-loot aspect more interesting. Under this idea I see no point in implementing combat. If the rewards to risk ratio were matched then I would see value in having both. But if death is permanent and trade skills don't have an equally risky detrament the reward for combat would have to be much more to compensate. So suppose Jmurph goes ahead Don Quixote-style and "wastes" his time implementing combat in a game where combat is massively less profitable than trade skills. Does this mean all the players are going to walk in instantly and say "Hmm. Combat is less profitable than trade skills. Therefore, I will focus on trade skills to the total exclusion of all combat"? Players who engage in combat do so for many different reasons; you could make it so that combat has no reward and heavy costs, and a few players would still willingly engage in it and strenuously object to any suggestion of removing it. If combat was significantly but not cripplingly less efficient than trade skills, plenty of players would still go for combat just for the heck of it, and some of them would manage to succeed. Moreover, let's assume that the assumptions behind your statement are correct, and players are motivated purely by in-game profit. If a game perfectly balances the profit of combat and non-combat activities, then under this assumption, players will split roughly 50/50 between combat and non-combat trades (I will assert again however that given a perfect balance of rewards, you'll still see a bias towards combat). Is this the only possible player distribution? Maybe I want about two-thirds of the players to focus on trade skills and one-third to focus on combat. What's so bad about that? Limiting combat rewards could be a very effective way to curb--but not eliminate!--combat, not necessarily because you don't want combat, but simply because you want it to occupy a certain niche. If done properly, then even if combat is inherently less profitable than trade skills, market pressure will shift the balance enough to support a small class of successful fighters. | |
At least I wasn't the one who did it first this time, which means I can score points off of you. :P Keeping tabs :)? Your understandification are imcorrect! I mean, seriously. Probably would be best if the original author was to correct my understanding of his post :P. Yours might be a bit biased just like mine. 2. Combat should revolve around meaningful choices. This holds true even in pure combat games--it is, in effect, an alternate wording for the suggestion you made for non-combat features. Yes this is something certainly missing in all the MMO games I've played :P. However for most comparisons I wasn't trying to compare to MMOs. 3. Combat would usually not be fought to the death. This is a feature to limit the risk of combat; at worst, it's a mitigating factor, and depending on the specifics of implementation it could possibly make combat less painful compared to many non-permadeath solutions. Still the risk of death or anything largely debilitating would have to be largely compensated which would generally make combat lead to being the get rich quick solution again. If you'd want the rewards rate to be comparable permadeath wouldn't be very fair unless you some how add a similiarly large risk or detrement to the other ways of reward gain/advancement. So suppose Jmurph goes ahead Don Quixote-style and "wastes" his time implementing combat in a game where combat is massively less profitable than trade skills. Does this mean all the players are going to walk in instantly and say "Hmm. Combat is less profitable than trade skills. Therefore, I will focus on trade skills to the total exclusion of all combat"? If there is no unique reward that can be gained through combat and it isn't interesting to do then I don't see why I would bother with combat :P. Players who engage in combat do so for many different reasons; I don't see any reasons other than good reward to effort to risk ratio, unique reward, or its simpley entertaining in its own right. you could make it so that combat has no reward and heavy costs, and a few players would still willingly engage in it and strenuously object to any suggestion of removing it. Please feel free to cite an example or demonstrate. Unless combat provides one of the three things I listed above I don't think people would do it except out of initial curiosity. Moreover, let's assume that the assumptions behind your statement are correct, and players are motivated purely by in-game profit. Well if I didn't mention it in previous posts I'm making the addendum of unique rewards and if the gameplay segment in itself is inherintly fun. If a game perfectly balances the profit of combat and non-combat activities, then under this assumption, players will split roughly 50/50 between combat and non-combat trades (I will assert again however that given a perfect balance of rewards, you'll still see a bias towards combat). Well you still have to balance in the risk and effort. If the trade skills could be macroed in such a way that the player would just have to press one button repetativly I think there would be a large bias towards trade skills. It's largely amazing how powerful the bragging rights reward is even if its not something worth bragging over. Always amazing how many chatters on chatters care about their rating and trying to find a way to increase it without their effort :P. However if you managed to balance all that out too I'd agree with your bias towards combat as that seems to come more intuitivly to people. Is this the only possible player distribution? Maybe I want about two-thirds of the players to focus on trade skills and one-third to focus on combat. What's so bad about that? Limiting combat rewards could be a very effective way to curb--but not eliminate!--combat The problem is curbing it isn't that simple as the slightest noticable difference is going to heavily tip that scale provided the effort, risk, and understandability are reasonably balanced. Though this depends on your playerbase. It's probably easier to balance the scale if your playerbase isn't as competative though generally thats how it turns out when you give them the data to compete with. | |
You'd be surprised how many players there are out there who prefer clicking on monsters and having them go splat so you can pick up their items and sell them rather than, say, clicking on trees and having them fall down so you can pick them up and sell them. For some, taking virtual lives holds a certain innate appeal which trade skills just can't duplicate. =P
It's odd, but I've seen it happen. | |
You'd be surprised how many players there are out there who prefer clicking on monsters and having them go splat so you can pick up their items and sell them rather than, say, clicking on trees and having them fall down so you can pick them up and sell them. For some, taking virtual lives holds a certain innate appeal which trade skills just can't duplicate. =P Yeah I made a small amount of money hacking trees and making stuff out of them in Ultima Online for a few hours and got just as bored as whacking bats and rats for a few hours and getting next to nothing also. Maybe I've been spoiled by too many none massivly multiplayer games in which you can actually accomplish a measurable amount of progress in a few hours :P. | |
While the market is currently dominated by the crap games, you should do what I do. Don't spend a cent on anything, and play the One Game that rules them all. Achaea. The fact that its a text mud scares away most of its potential player base, but its got so much depth to it. The game is about roleplaying - there's plenty of glitz, too, but the roleplaying is whats good. The players run the world - the cities, the guilds (and I really do mean they run them), and the Gods are constantly there making things interesting with Divine Orders and plots. Its also constantly being updated - new features are not rare.
Another game that really took me by surprise is a Tale in the Desert. Its graphical, and a MMORPG with no combat whatsoever. Actually, thats not true - last year they made an April Fool's joke of adding a completely functional combat system for a day. Both of those games are incredible in innovation, and they definately have a player bases. If you build it, they will come. So long as you don't try for something larger then you can handle, in the incorrect market. | |
Theodis wrote:
I don't see any reasons other than good reward to effort to risk ratio, unique reward, or its simpley entertaining in its own right. As Crispy touched on in his post, you missed one major reason: thematic preferences. Suppose a game features a number of character classes, one of which is a necromancer. Suppose further that the necromancer's class skills are not very effective, they have no especially unique functions, and they are not particularly interesting to play compared to similar superior classes. In spite of all this, you will have some players playing as necromancers simply because they like necromancers. These players will vary in their persistance, and yes, many of them will discard the necromancer once they see that there are more effective classes available, but that won't stop diehards. In a game where you can choose between being a craftsman-merchant or being an ineffectual fighter, a few players will always play as fighters simply because they like the idea of being a fighter. Moreover, let's assume that the assumptions behind your statement are correct, and players are motivated purely by in-game profit. Unique rewards are part of in-game profit. Additionally, many of your arguments seem to imply that you consider fun to be a product of in-game profit; you've made objections to the idea of lowering in-game profit on the grounds that it would be less fun. Well you still have to balance in the risk and effort. If the trade skills could be macroed in such a way that the player would just have to press one button repetativly I think there would be a large bias towards trade skills. I'm talking about a theoretical perfect state of balance, which would preclude such a situation from happening. If there was an advantage to be gained by macroing trade skills, then trade skills would not be balanced perfectly with combat; if there was no advantage, then you would see little to no bias. I'll concede the possibility of a slight bias, because some players are lazy enough to look for a way to do something with less work even if it means less reward. This is offset to some degree by the boredom factor; some players will pursue a more interesting, involved task even if it means less rewards than the boring, repetitive task, but I can't really say that the one trend or the other would be dominant. The problem is curbing it isn't that simple as the slightest noticable difference is going to heavily tip that scale provided the effort, risk, and understandability are reasonably balanced. Though this depends on your playerbase. It's probably easier to balance the scale if your playerbase isn't as competative though generally thats how it turns out when you give them the data to compete with. That's why you have some degree of uniqueness in rewards. Maybe rewards for one thing or another aren't even wholly unique--they're just things that one activity can earn more easily than the other. For instance, maybe dragon's livers are an important ingredient for brewing a popular and widely used potion. Someone can craft and sell a lot of stuff to NPC merchants at a fixed rate and use it to buy dragon's livers from the NPC apothecary with an unlimited stock, but at a very high price. A player who builds a fighter character, on the other hand, can go out and hunt dragons himself, but there's a limited supply of dragons to hunt and there are still various costs associated with dragon-hunting (including the income lost from time spent dragon-hunting instead of building furniture or whatnot). If only a small portion of the player population is hunting dragons, they can find and procure dragon livers quickly and at low cost and sell them to other players at high prices just a bit below what the apothecary charges, easily earning income equal to some of the best build-stuff-and-sell-it type guys. But if there's a sudden influx of new dragon hunters, the length of time it takes to find and kill a dragon goes up, costs rise, and prices drop from competition. Dragon-hunting ceases to be profitable. In the long run things will stabilize and there will be a fairly steady, but low, number of dragon-hunters. This isn't necessarily an example of world-class game design, but it illustrates the point fairly well. Even if the rewards the game hands out from combat are inherently smaller than the rewards earned from trade skills, so long as there's some sort of difference between the two types of rewards, economic factors can still straighten the two out. | |
Elder Scrolls 4 is doing things like this, but they've been having problems where a townsperson kills an animal for food, the guards sees them and attacks them, then another guard sees the peasant get attacked, and attacks the guard, who is assisted by others..etc.
It keeps ending up having a royal rumble of guards while the NPCs rob the town... I really wish I had their current alpha for the game. :P TEXT MUDs do things better than most mmorpgs, because of how they're made. It's hard to explain, but the good text muds are more in depth than any graphical mmorpg will ever be. Sadly, no text mud has thousands of people playing it 24/7. It's all in implementation though. | |
I don't know... my game is very much so out of the ordinary... and it does well but not that fantastic.
When it comes down to it people don't really like to learn a complicated game... where you have to actually think about how you're treating your pet or character. A few do, and those come to games like mine... but for the most part, if you can't hold someone by the hand through it, you've lost 50% of the possible players YOU COULD have had. It just keeps going downhill from there... Things can easily become burdens, since after all you're playing a game... you don't want it to be identical to life... You want it to be far off so you can do things you couldn't in life. 90% of people are idiots, so you have to consider do you want only the last 10%? | |
You're sounding just as zealous as me :P.
From JMurph's post on perma death
"However, I think that much concern over permadeath also relates to the fact that death and combat are far to easilly doled out in most modern RPGs/MMOGs and responsible for far too much reward. If combat was less forced on players, revolved around meaningful choices and combat generally broke off whenever serious pain was inflicted (not always to the death), I don't know that this would be a valid complaint anymore.
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And if monsters didn't always carry around treasure/resource hordes, how many players would go after them anyway?"
Anyway the way that I understood it was that there was no attempt to balance the rewards/risks but to make combat so risky with little gain that players would not want to pursue it. Under this idea I see no point in implementing combat. If the rewards to risk ratio were matched then I would see value in having both. But if death is permanent and trade skills don't have an equally risky detrament the reward for combat would have to be much more to compensate.